Article ID: | iaor1998530 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 24 |
Issue: | 8 |
Start Page Number: | 749 |
End Page Number: | 755 |
Publication Date: | Aug 1997 |
Journal: | Computers and Operations Research |
Authors: | Hurley W.J., Finan J.S. |
Keywords: | decision theory: multiple criteria, analytic hierarchy process |
Consider an AHP decision-maker who is uncertain about his or her preferences. In fact, suppose he or she is only able to specify unbiased estimates of these preferences. Then given the decision-maker's final pairwise comparison matrix having a consistency ratio less than 0.10, is it possible for the reliability of the analysis to be improved by using some artificial means to lower the consistency ratio (i.e. a minimum perturbation of pairwise comparison matrix elements which reduces the consistency ratio by a given amount)? In this paper we argue that the answer to this question is yes. To make our point, we employ a Monte Carlo simulation of a decision-maker who picks random judgments out of a distribution centered at his or her